Trovatore, Sonnambula at the Met

In this week's New Yorker, I write about new productions of Il Trovatore and La Sonnambula at the Met and comment briefly on the company's 125th-anniversary gala. An excerpt:

Nothing in these operas is any more implausible than the events of the average Shakespeare play, or, for that matter, of the average action movie. The difference is that the conventions of the latter are widely accepted these days, so that if, say, Matt Damon rides a unicycle the wrong way down the Autobahn and kills a squad of Uzbek thugs with a package of Twizzlers the audience cheers rather than guffaws.